Henry I King of England

Henry Purcell and librettist John Dryden never dreamed of a production of King Arthur like this one, where Merlin descends to the stage via a sailboard, and where Arthur and his rival, the Saxon King Oswald, fight a boxing match ("Round One! Box!") for a unified England and for the love of Emmeline. The work's extensive spoken passages – longer than those which are sung – are performed in German by actors, while the vocal music is performed in the original English by singers. The libretto, in addition to being lengthened, has been updated and now contains references to video cameras, the Bayreuth Festival, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and to Maestro Harnoncourt himself… Raymond Tuttle

Big Bad Smitty, whose real name is John Henry Smith, is a Mississippi guitarist in the style of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters. During his youth, Smitty played in the region of Greenville with Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes, a friend from school. The pair established a band and also played gigs in Arkansas. Smitty settled in Jackson, MS, and drove a truck for a living when he was in his twenties. The local blues scene afforded him the opportunity to play with musicians such as King Mose, Sam Myers, King Edward, and John Littlejohn…….

London, April 1604. With the freshly printed partbooks of his Lachrimæ under his arm, John Dowland walks from the printing house to his home in Fetter Lane. He should have been back in Denmark long ago, but for the moment all his thoughts are on the new publication he is carrying, his latest and most ambitious work to date: a complete cycle of instrumental music, twenty-one dances, honourably dedicated to Anne of Denmark, Queen of England.’ For Dowland has just completed one of the greatest masterpieces of Renaissance music. He had left England to enter the service of the Danish court, disappointed at not being appointed court composer to Elizabeth I, but he seems to have made the best of all his setbacks to compose this magnificent collection of purely instrumental works, much of it bathed in the melancholy typical of late sixteenth-century England.